1890290 - Disk usage out of control

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1878541

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Luca Moscato]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:124.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/124.0

Steps to reproduce:

Environment: Thunderbird 124.0 64bits installed as SNAP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
3 gmail imap account

This (monday) morning Ubuntu notify me that I was running out of disk space, and while I was checking where the problem was, the disk analyzer told me the answer

snap/thunderbird/common directory has a size of more than 360GB, pretty strange since my gmail account have 15GB and 30GB of quota (half used more or less)
One of them is a shared one we use for notfication with almost 100k emails, flow is very high since with my team we receive emails, handle and archive them.

Actual results:

I tryed to compact database, keep on disk only latest 90 days email but the system started to suffer issues due to no disk space so that I tried to remove that account and instantly more than 250GB of data on disk disappeared.

Expected results:

Issue found and fixed but:

• Thunderbird should NOT use so much disk space, some cleanup process MUST be implemented to keep disk usage under control, as I wrote system usage is impaired
• Is this issue index-related? Since I do a lot of quick search on that account
• Is something snap/linux related? Could be found also on Windows/Mac?
• If someone needs logs, I'd be happy to provide them but I need instructions about how to retrieve them.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Find your thunderbird profile, which you can determine in Help > Troubleshooting Info.

It is a bug that has been around for a long time but seems to be most impacting beta users. Some of the related bugs are cited in bug 1890230.

For now, avoid using Compact and disable automatic compact in Settings.

Do you recall, was it an nstmp file. Or a file is in a subdirectory of imapmail?

Comment 2

[Luca Moscato]

Attachment: photo_2024-04-08_11-45-18.jpg

This was the disk situation during my problem, folders impacted were nstmp and All Mail

Comment 3

[Ringo De Smet]

(copy info from my Matrix conversation)

I have two Macbooks running Thunderbird, both connected to the same Google Workspace mail account (aka custom domain instead of @gmail.com).

• one mac is running TB stable, currently at 115.9.0.
  • local Thunderbird profile folder occupying 12.3GB.
• the other running TB beta, currently at 125.0b5.
  • local Thunderbird profile folder occupying 466.1GB of disk space

In the Google web portal, under Mail Settings, I can read that I have 44.9GB of email in the account.

Disk usage info:

It is within ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile-name>/ImapMail/imap.gmail.com/[Gmail].sbd.
On the stable system:

total 16237328
      0 drwx------@ 14 ringods  staff   448B Apr  5 16:35 .
      0 drwxr-xr-x@ 26 ringods  staff   832B Apr  5 16:35 ..
8150848 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   3.9G Apr  9 21:43 All Mail
  41088 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff    20M Apr  9 21:43 All Mail.msf
  98416 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff    48M Apr  9 15:56 Bin
    776 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   344K Apr  9 21:20 Bin.msf
      0 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff     0B Apr  5 16:35 Drafts
      8 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   2.6K Apr  9 21:33 Drafts.msf
3311648 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   1.6G Apr  8 22:23 Sent Mail
  13184 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   5.5M Apr  9 00:01 Sent Mail.msf
      8 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   2.7K Mar 21 14:49 Spam.msf
  13720 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   6.7M Apr  5 15:30 Starred
     48 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff    23K Apr  8 22:10 Starred.msf
4607584 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   2.2G Apr  4 20:17 nstmp

On the beta system:

total 886639144
        0 drwx------@ 14 ringods  staff   448B Apr  9 10:27 .
        0 drwxr-xr-x@ 26 ringods  staff   832B Apr  9 10:27 ..
  2815376 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   1.3G Apr  9 21:32 All Mail
    37432 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff    17M Apr  9 21:33 All Mail.msf
    15544 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   7.6M Apr  9 10:27 Bin
       96 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff    48K Apr  9 10:32 Bin.msf
        0 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff     0B Apr  9 10:27 Drafts
        8 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   2.4K Apr  9 21:32 Drafts.msf
273094024 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   130G Apr  9 21:32 Sent Mail
    12792 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   5.2M Apr  9 21:33 Sent Mail.msf
       16 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff   4.9K Apr  3 20:33 Spam.msf
     5920 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   2.9M Apr  7 20:24 Starred
       48 -rw-r--r--@  1 ringods  staff    23K Apr  8 21:25 Starred.msf
610657888 -rw-------@  1 ringods  staff   291G Apr  9 10:44 nstmp

In my case, the two biggest files are Sent Mail at 130GB and nstmp at 291GB.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

You should find this was fixed a couple months ago in beta.